Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  He stood next to the twenty-foot-tall shrub. The others gathered around, looking at him. Here’s the last place I remember, he thought.

  “I was hiding here, and the guy on the bike was switchbacking down the slope, I could hear the bike, a low-pitched compression, motor noise, then I saw his red headlamp.”

  “You use red ’cause it won’t ruin your eyes at night,” Stoner said.

  “Yeah, I thought he’d be using night vision, but the NV scope was on his crossbow and I guess he got around using that headlamp. I didn’t see him until he was pretty close, maybe up there, he went past that big white oak.” He pointed, and saw in his mind the red glow disappearing as the bike passed behind the trunk, reappearing on the other side, slowing for another turn. “He came right toward me, couldn’t see me at all.” He hesitated. They would find it later if they searched the tractor shed, so better to get it out now, when he could manage the story. “I was wearing this old poncho I’d done up as kind of a ghillie suit.”

  “A ghillie suit?”

  “My homemade version.” They all seemed to know what a ghillie suit was. Sheriff Walker’s face didn’t give away much, but Stoner and a couple of the others were starting to smile, trying not to seem eager. Of course you were wearing a ghillie suit.

  “I’m supposed to keep track of the wildlife here, keep records of what I see and where. I figured good camouflage would help. I got in the habit of using it when I’m out in the woods.” He shrugged. It was time to start making shit up anyway. “So I was kind of crouched here by the bush, in the poncho”—Rice pointed—“and he was right there when I just stood up. I startled him, I guess. He slid his bike down hard on his leg, but he got right up. I was starting to tell him this is posted property and he was trespassing and what was his name, I don’t know how far I got before he . . .” Rice paused, distracted. The night was coming back to him now, just a trickle at first, but vivid, real. As he stood there, he felt himself rise and fly down the mountain.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m trying to remember exactly what happened. It was a little disturbing. He pulled one of his arrows from a quiver on his crossbow and tried to stab me with it.”

  “Bolt,” Stoner corrected.

  “I bolted all right. I took off down the hill, that way.” He pointed to where he’d followed behind the poacher after he’d ridden past. He started moving downslope, following the memory as it came to life in his mind. At the same time, he was struggling to make up a more palatable story for his audience. He took big steps, sliding in the leaves on the steep slope, and the others followed, slipping and sidestepping, trying to keep up. His stomach flipped and sank, reliving the roller-coaster drop of his final wild sprint at the poacher.

  Fifty yards down, he felt the impact, the deep compression of the guy’s ribs under his shoulder, heard a retching expulsion of breath. His momentum lifted the poacher from the bike, the plastic bag of bear bait bursting, a sick rotten sweetness in his face, Rice and the poacher airborne together, the poacher relaxed, almost limp, must be knocked out. He held on to the guy’s pack, holding it away from his face, the crossbow strapped there swinging wild. They hit the slope hard and slid in the deep leaf litter.

  He stopped in the spot where they’d landed, waited until the others caught up and were standing around him again. No one said anything.

  “I ran down here, but he followed on his bike.” Even after yesterday’s rain, the forest duff was obviously disturbed in a broad, twisting path leading toward the cliff overlooking the inner gorge. “He ditched the bike somewhere around here and came at me on foot. He had a big plastic bag on his bike, with the bait, and I could smell it, I think it must’ve broken open.” He bent over and pawed through the rain-wet moldering leaves. “Critters probably ate most of it by now, but there should still be some of the crap that spilled out.”

  Derek and the other dogs found it, scratching in the leaves themselves, sniffing and wagging at the soggy popcorn, fragments of glazed doughnuts. The tall woman stooped to look at what they’d found, praising the dogs.

  Both legs felt wobbly when he stood; the fight was coming back to him in real time.

  They rolled twice, three times, fast, the red headlamp went dark, and Rice started to push away, meaning to roll clear to his feet, but the poacher came to life, strong hands ripping at the poncho, reaching back to claw at the back of Rice’s head, pulling, trying to flip him forward. When Rice threw his leg around to clamp the other man’s thigh and brace himself, the man’s head jerked back in a wild head-butt. Rice turned to the side at the last instant but the glancing blow above his ear was still hard enough to set off a bright orange flash behind his eyes. The guy had too much fight left and Rice wanted to finish him. He unhooked his leg but hung on to the pack, twisted it to tangle the guy up in the straps, then he levered to his feet, and pivoting, using what was left of their momentum, he slung the poacher as hard as he could into a tree trunk.

  That should have been the end of the fight. What came next should not have happened. Surprise, a touch of admiration, a little fear flushed through him in the remembering. He knew he should say something to the sheriff and the searchers—they were standing and watching him, waiting—but he closed his eyes and saw the guy bounce off the tree with a grunt, spinning, moving fast and low like a wolf spider in the broken moonlight, shedding his pack and pulling a bolt from the quiver on the crossbow in one impossible motion, lunging at Rice with the glinting black blades on its head. He felt the point catch in the layers of burlap on the poncho and he threw himself backward, twisting away from the attack, the other man pursuing and making short, efficient thrusts with the bolt.

  “He’s got the bolt in his hand, it has a broadhead, I could see that in the moonlight.” He fought to control his breathing so he could speak, his body responding to the memory, injecting his blood with counterproductive adrenaline. “I thought it was poisoned. He’d been using poison on the bears. I thought he was going to kill me. If I hadn’t been wearing the ghillie with all that thick burlap, he would’ve killed me.” He backed along the path of torn-up leaves he and the poacher had made, half-mimicking in slow motion his part in the fight. He didn’t have to make this up. “He kept stabbing at me, and he got me a few times, not deep. I was scrambling, backing up, trying to get away from him.”

  He remembered backing up fast, dodging behind tree trunks, feeling in the leaves for a stick, a rock, anything. The poacher was wheezing hard, couldn’t catch his breath, but he kept pushing, not speaking, a relentless shadow, anticipating Rice’s movements, denying him time to find his footing or come up with a weapon. Rice knew he had to try something or die so he faked a stumble, shifting his weight to his left foot and setting up a round kick with his right leg. The poacher bought it and moved in close, the four-blade tip whistling in the air as he swiped it at Rice’s face, trying to blind him. Rice blocked it with his hand and threw the kick low, connecting with his shin on the outside of the poacher’s knee, buckling it, but at the same time the broadhead bit through the cotton glove into his palm and he thought of the poison, the realization coming in an instant, thinking, Now I’m dead, this asshole just killed me.

  He was only vaguely aware of the sheriff and the others. This immersion in his own memory was a version of his usual fugue and at some level he understood he was probably acting oddly, but he also knew that if he resisted it he might never know what had happened. He let it come, a little afraid of what he would find out, stepping along in the leaves, watching the end of the fight unfold in his mind.

  He caught the poacher’s wrist to hold off the bolt and stepped close enough to pound with his other fist, hammering the side of the guy’s head, his face, but the poacher was strong and even with Rice’s hand locked onto his wrist the bolt smacked his jaw, stabbed his left side where the burlap wasn’t as thick. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care about the poison now. He grabbed the man’s head with his thumb jamming into an eye socket and the man cursed
for the first time as Rice wrenched him to the right, forcing him to put his weight on his left leg, and while it was pinned there he slammed the knee with another round kick. This time something cracked and he went down, a controlled backward roll, pulling Rice down too, trying to pull him onto the bolt, to impale him, but Rice pushed with his legs, jumping forward at the last second, somersaulting over the broadhead, and it was as if he had dived into nothingness. The man’s grip on his poncho failed and the ground fell away under him until he smashed feetfirst through a rhododendron bush and slid on his ass another fifty feet, grabbing at branches ripping past, pain spiking as he struck rock with his knee, his ribs, his head.

  He stood at the edge of the cliff where he’d fallen. He was lucky; the slope down to the ledge where he’d fetched up wasn’t absolutely vertical, and it was thick with brush. Leaves had begun to wilt on the branches he’d broken on his way down. The others had followed, and when he turned to read their faces, Stoner was the only one still skeptical. Rice’s story was true, true for the sheriff and the others. He wasn’t acting. They didn’t know he’d been remembering it for the first time—what they saw was a man recalling a traumatic experience, and it gave his account authenticity that went beyond good acting.

  “I fell down there. I didn’t mean to, but it’s what saved me. The brush broke my fall. I was out for a while on that ledge, and by the time I climbed back up and dragged my ass over the edge here it was quiet. He was gone, back up that slope, I guess.” Rice made a zigzag motion with his hand to describe the guy’s path, the way he could get a trail bike in and out of that steep gorge. “He probably figured he’d killed me.”

  “He cut you. You must’ve been wrong about the poison.”

  Rice looked at Stoner. “I guess so.”

  More remembering: a dead man, vengeful and impotent, he clawed his way back up the cliff, his own right leg nearly useless, nausea sweeping his guts, nausea and a seething, disbelieving wrath. He tried to run up the slope to follow but his knee was bad and wouldn’t hold him. The pain rushed in and he leaned against a tree, vomited some watery bile, all he had. The poison was starting to work. He hoped he’d at least done some real damage to the guy’s knee. That left eye would be sore for a while, too. He staggered to the edge of the cliff and sat there on a rock. His pulse still raced, but his breathing quieted. He didn’t experience vivid memories from his life. He felt tired. He dry-heaved a few times. No more hallucinations, no transcendent experiences. Just pain, bad but not yet so bad that he couldn’t handle it. He wondered how the poison would kill him. Convulsions? Internal bleeding? Would he start vomiting blood? He hoped he wouldn’t shit himself. A panic attack threatened briefly, but he quelled it.

  He waited to die while the moonlight failed, moonset darkening the forest in the inner gorge. At least this was a good place to do it. But the minutes passed, and he didn’t get worse. In fact, after twenty minutes he felt a little better, the nausea passing the way it usually did when he injured his knee. He’d always had glass kneecaps, and he’d had to learn to manage pain at an early age. Eventually he decided he wasn’t dying after all and began the long, excruciating hobble back to the lodge. No detour to smash up anyone’s truck, though; no way, not in his condition. He’d gone straight home.

  “You know,” Stoner was saying, “it don’t surprise me Mirra come at you like that, with the bolt. That fucker can go off like a grenade.”

  “Shut up, Stoner,” Janie said.

  “You all know him?” The poacher, so long a frustrating mystery, had a name. Mirra. Rice wondered why they hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “What does surprise me,” Stoner continued, ignoring both of them, “is you still breathing. He’s a scary mother barehanded, but a guy like that comes at you with a weapon of any kind, he comes at you with a ballpoint pen, and you are a fucking ghost.”

  “Bayard.” This was the sheriff. Stoner shut up.

  Rice nodded, agreeing with Stoner. He would dream of it again: that quick spidery shadow, stabbing, black blades in the moonlight.

  “I’m breathing,” he said, “because I ran backward as fast as I could and fell down the damn cliff.”

  They all laughed at this, even Sheriff Walker, even Stoner, after a moment.

  Rice grinned, playing the part, but he didn’t feel like laughing. He was wondering where this Mirra had gone. It made him nervous that no one knew where he was.

  Thirty-Seven

  At the lodge, the sheriff answered a call on his cell and sat in his SUV to talk while Stoner and Janie drove the ATVs back onto the trailer. They planned to drive around to the far side of the mountain and up the Forest Service road to join the rest of the search party. They’d all agreed that if they were going to find Mirra they had better do it before the storm hit, so the group had split up in the gorge, and two of the guys had used ropes to rappel to the bottom with the smaller Labrador so they could search along the base of the cliff. Rice had told them they would be able to climb out a mile or so upstream. He was uncomfortable with their intrusion into the inner gorge, but under the circumstances there wasn’t much he could do about it. The others, with Derek the shepherd and the chunkier Lab, had set off on the trail of the motorbike, though apparently rubber tires didn’t leave much of a scent for the dogs to follow, especially after a hard rain.

  Rice put away the rest of the groceries, and when he checked, Walker was still on the phone but Stoner and Janie had left without him. The sheriff had asked Rice for his driver’s license, and by now he’d had someone run his license and plates, which was a problem. Supposedly the top cartels had got IT religion a few years ago and hired a bunch of elite hackers out of Eastern Europe to quietly infiltrate computer networks used by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Now simply querying his name in the Arizona MVD database was like sending up an electronic flare: Rice Moore is in Turpin County, Virginia. Or maybe it wasn’t that precise. Or maybe the whole story was another tall tale, his pals in CERESO messing with him.

  He was about to start the coffee machine when he heard the Explorer’s door slam and then Walker’s boots slow and loud on the front steps. Rice met him on the porch. He was frowning and his lips were pressed in a tight line like he was biting back his temper.

  “Is Rice a family name? It’s unusual.”

  Shit. “My mother’s middle name. Not sure why they gave it to me as a first name but they did.”

  “And you’ve been using ‘Rick Morton’ because you’re hiding out from the Mexican drug gang you testified against last year.”

  “I never had to formally testify, but yeah, to them I’m a loose end. Or maybe more like a hangnail. I think if they could find me they’d try to take me out.”

  “But you’re not in WITSEC. You’re hiding on your own.”

  Rice nodded. Walker was mad but didn’t seem mad at him. The wind was gusting oddly from the south, warm and wet. Rice could feel it plainly now: a dramatic, unfamiliar change in the weather.

  “You want to come inside? I’m making coffee.”

  Walker’s face relaxed a bit. Rice thought he saw the start of a slow grin. His primary suspect in a potential homicide offering him coffee. “Out here’s just fine, Mr. Moore.” He stepped over to the railing and leaned forward with his hands on the top, looked out at the big view. Nearly everyone who spent more than a few seconds on this porch seemed to do the same thing. Rice had done it a few times himself. Today the valley was soft and far off in the weird light coming from those high green clouds. He watched Walker sidelong.

  “So what now?”

  “Well, I have an ex-con who was the last person to see Mirra and who admits to being in a life-or-death fight with him the night he disappeared.”

  “Life-or-death for me. Not so much for him.”

  Walker didn’t say anything. He seemed to be working through a decision-making process even as Rice watched. Might be a good time to argue his case a bit.

  “Sheriff, I told you the truth up there. And my record, the thi
ng in Mexico, it was all completely nonviolent. No reason to think I’d hurt anyone. All that mess, that whole world, it’s behind me. I’ve made a new start here.”

  “Right, well, I talked to your boss and she sure vouched for you. But now here comes the real interesting part. I also just talked to someone who insists you are violent, a dangerous hombre, and he wants me to lock you up.”

  This made no sense. Rice frowned but didn’t reply.

  “He thinks you killed Mirra and hid the body. He’s a fed.” Walker’s voice was flat, but it conveyed his feelings about federal law enforcement officers telling local sheriffs what to do.

  Rice shook his head. Still made zero sense. He hesitated. “I didn’t kill the guy. You know I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know anything. If we find Alan Mirra dead up on that mountain of anything other than a rattlesnake bite, Bayard’ll be back up here with his handcuffs.” He turned away for a moment like he was hiding the grin that had finally taken over his face. Probably picturing Mirra chasing Rice over the cliff. “But I believe your story. Most of it.”

  “Thanks.” He supposed he should start praying to the mountain gods that Mirra turns up drunk somewhere, nursing a sprained knee, a black eye. Busted ribs. A swollen ear. Shit. “This fed, how does he know me?”

  Walker shrugged. “He’s the one who flagged Mirra going missing in the first place, and he’s been bothering me—bothering Suzy—about him since yesterday morning. I owed him an update. When I mentioned your name, your real name, and the fact that you’re the caretaker up here, he ’bout had kittens. He knew your record. Said he’s run your prints. I don’t think he likes you much.”

  “Where in the hell did he get my prints?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “I have absolutely no idea who this guy could be, or how he knows me, or where—why—he would’ve picked up my fingerprints.”